“I’m not,” he said. “We’re dying, so what does it matter?”
He turned on the strobe light. We stayed up late in the night listening to some sort of death metal, all screams and guitar. I remember slamming my body into the wall. I remember lying on the floor and pulling a blanket over me.
I’m convinced he tried to poison me in my sleep. The next morning they found me unresponsive. I don’t remember being carried out of the house, the ambulance ride, or anything else. I woke up in a hospital bed on the third floor of Southwest Central Hospital, where they watched me for several days. There, my mother kept telling the nurses I wasn’t a bad kid. They fed me tapioca pudding. They helped me out of bed and tried to talk to me, but I wanted to be left alone. I watched cartoons and old movies on TV.
“He’s a quiet kid,” one of the nurses told my mother. “He never talks.”
When I returned home, the first people who came to see me were Milosz and Gertrude. They brought me angel wings. We drank tea and listened to old records on the antique record player. I mostly kept to myself in my bedroom.
My mother said Monfiori tried to hang himself and they took him away. He wouldn’t be coming back for a while.
“That boy is nothing like my son,” my mother told Milosz and Gertrude. “He was trouble, it’s so sad,” she said.
They all agreed I was nothing like him.
“My son’s very happy,” my mother kept saying.
First known photograph of Lincoln, 1846.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Your Friend Forever, A. Lincoln:
The Enduring Friendship of Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed
Charles B. Strozier
… he allways thanked Josh for his Mary.
—Abner Y. Ellis
On February 25, 1842, Abraham Lincoln wrote a letter to his devoted friend, Joshua Speed, who had written him the day before reporting on Speed’s marriage to Fanny Henning:
I received yours of the 12th. written the day you went down to William’s place, some days since; but delayed answering it, till I should receive the promised one, of the 16th., which came last night. I opened the latter, with intense anxiety and trepidation—so much, that although it turned out better than I expected, I have hardly yet, at the distance of ten hours, become calm.
Speed had gotten married on February 15, and clearly had promised Lincoln he would write, as soon as he possibly could after consummating his marriage, to report on its outcome. Speed, it seems, had barely tumbled out of his wedding bed on the morning of February 16 before writing. In fact, even though “it turned out better than [Speed] expected,” Lincoln the next day was still not calm “at the distance of ten hours.” That is a long time for a man, then thirty-three years of age, to be experiencing such anxiety from the news of how his twenty-seven-year-old friend’s wedding night turned out.
Abraham Lincoln made Speed (whose side of the correspondence is unfortunately lost) his vicarious substitute in the courtship of Fanny. Through Speed he could work through his tormented fears of intimacy. While making Speed’s marriage his own indirect realization, his relief is palpable. “I tell you, Speed, our forebodings, for which you and I are rather peculiar, are all the worst sort of nonsense.” He then recounts the dreaded passing of days for him in his letter of February 25 as he awaited news of the wedding with an obsessive-compulsive intensity punctuated by gratuitous underlinings.
I fancied, from the time I received your letter of saturday, that the one of wednesday was never to come; and yet it did come, and what is more, it is perfectly clear, both from [its] tone and handwriting, that you were much happier, or, if you think the term preferable, less miserable, when you wrote it, than when you wrote the last one before. You had so obviously improved, at the verry time I so much feared, you would have grown worse.
But a shadow remains.
You say that “something indescribably horrible and alarming still haunts you.[”] You will not say that three months from now, I will venture. When your nerves once get steady now, the whole trouble will be over forever. Nor should you become impatient at their being even verry slow, in becoming steady. Again; you say you much fear that that Elysium of which you have dreamed so much, is never to be realized. Well, if it shall not, I dare swear, it will not be the fault of her who is now your wife. I now have no doubt that it is the peculiar misfortune of both you and me, to dream dreams of Elysium far exceeding all that any thing earthly can realize.
The perplexing line in the letter (“You say that ‘something indescribably horrible and alarming still haunts you’”) suggests Speed felt great relief at his ability to carry out sexual intercourse with Fanny but remained troubled that the sky did not suddenly clear and the heavens part. Lincoln at first seems not to be particularly worried about Speed’s feelings that something “indescribably horrible” still haunted him, writing with confidence, “You will not say that three months from now.” But he cannot entirely dismiss Speed’s fears that his “dreams of Elysium” would never be realized. His argument addressing these concerns here is somewhat elliptical. On the one hand, he is confident that Speed’s fears will fade in due time based on the most welcome news that the marriage consummation went well. As long as that is over, things have to improve, and Speed’s anxiety will gradually dissipate. It would seem the message from Speed was: “Things went well, but I still feel bad.” Lincoln’s encouragement of Speed, on the other hand, reflects some ambivalence for Speed’s continued doubts that, given his identification with his friend, poses the danger of circling back onto himself. Lincoln gently chastises Speed and tells him his unhappiness lingers from his nervous temperament and “will not be the fault of her who is now your wife.” But perhaps feeling bad for this subtle criticism he immediately returns to his identification with Speed and affirms their common experience with emotional problems.
In that imagined joy lies a contradiction. Speed’s marriage means he will never again be available in the same total way for Lincoln. He is now joined with Fanny, forever apart. Lincoln had been more empathically attuned to Speed than anyone else in his life and nothing matches in intimacy that kind of connection with another. To lose it leaves one feeling lost and alone, abandoned, despairing. Speed’s marriage, for all the joy it brings Lincoln, is simultaneously a moment of dreaded loss and even a kind of symbolic death. In his triumphant experience of love, Speed categorically abandons his friend, though Lincoln tries mightily to relish Speed’s new love.
Lincoln continues in his February 25 letter:
Far short of your dreams as you may be, no woman could do more to realize them, than that same black eyed Fanny. If you could but contemplate her through my immagination, it would appear ridiculous to you, that any one should for a moment think of being unhappy with her. My old Father used to have a saying that “If you make a bad bargain, hug it the tighter”; and it occurs to me, that if the bargain you have just closed can possibly be called a bad one, it is certainly the most pleasant one for applying that maxim to, which my fancy can, by any effort, picture.
This story from his father about hugging a bad bargain, seemingly told as something of a joke, comes across as inappropriate, even odd. He does not feel at all that Speed has made a bad bargain in marrying Fanny Henning. On the contrary, he feels Fanny is lovely and a perfect match for his friend. What he tries to address is Speed’s continued doubts, which he gently mocks while at the same time identifying with them. The befuddled argument is all part of Lincoln’s confusions in dealing with his complex feelings about Speed and Fanny. He wants Speed to be happy in his marriage. At the same time, he hates losing Speed to Fanny and wants to keep him for himself, something he plays out with the subterfuge of enclosing a separate letter to Fanny:
I write another letter enclosing this, which you can show her, if she desires it. I do this, because, she would think strangely perhaps should you tell her that you receive no letters from me; or, telling her you do, should refuse to let her see them.
; I close this, entertaining the confident hope, that every successive letter I shall have from you, (which I here pray may not be few, nor far between,) may show you possessing a more steady hand, and cheerful heart, than the last preceding it. As ever, your friend LINCOLN
On April 15, 1837, Abraham Lincoln rode into Springfield from New Salem on a borrowed horse, with “no earthly goods but a pair of saddle-bags, two or three law books, and some clothing which he had in the saddle-bags,” as Speed later wrote to William Herndon (who tirelessly gathered material about his former law partner after 1865). Lincoln first “took an office,” which meant arranging to set up quarters with his new law partner, John Todd Stuart, and found a cabinetmaker willing to build him a bedstead. He then walked to Speed’s store on the west side of the square, tossed his saddlebags on the counter, and asked how much it would cost to buy materials for a bed. Speed calculated the price of the mattress, the blankets, and other needed materials as Lincoln browsed the store, noting the cost of each item. As he walked around, Lincoln told Speed he had just been admitted to the bar and was joining John Todd Stuart as his partner. He also told Speed of his plan to turn a small room adjacent to Stuart’s office into a sleeping room and that he had in fact already hired a local carpenter to build the bedstead. Speed calculated it would cost him seventeen dollars (though in another account Speed said the figure was thirty dollars). He offered to grant him credit for the cost of the materials, which at first Lincoln refused, and he nearly left the store, as he was still heavily indebted from his failed store partnership in New Salem and had only some seven dollars in his pocket. But Lincoln finally replied, “It is probably cheap enough, but I want to say that cheap as it is I have not the money to pay. But if you will credit me until Christmas, and my experiment here as a lawyer is a success, I will pay you then. If I fail in that I will probably never be able to pay you at all.” Speed was struck by Lincoln’s sad tone: “I never saw so gloomy, and melancholy a face.” He told Lincoln that since the “contraction of so small debt” affected him so deeply, he would offer another plan. “I have a very large room, and a very large double-bed in it; which you are perfectly welcome to share with me if you choose.” Lincoln asked where the room was, and after Speed told him, without saying a word, he walked upstairs and deposited his meager belongings. He came downstairs and, with his face “beaming with pleasure and smiles,” announced, “Well Speed I’m moved.”
Abraham Lincoln at twenty-eight years of age in 1837 was still rough around the edges but also on the way up in the world. As befit a figure well known in the state legislature, his pants no longer hung well above his boots; he even had a black suit and had begun to sport what became his distinctive top hat. He was a fully certified lawyer now and the junior partner of an old acquaintance and fellow Whig legislator, Springfield’s leading lawyer, John Todd Stuart.
Lincoln wore his thick black hair parted on the right, bracketing his large ears and accentuating his long face. His strong mouth often broke into a smile when he told jokes, which was frequently, and dimples appeared in his cheeks, especially on the right side. His sparkling gray eyes were round and deep and suggested mystery and a haunting tension. They evoked a perennial sadness that few friends or colleagues fully understood. A decade after arriving in Springfield, Lincoln once referred to “my old, withered, dry eyes” that “are full of tears yet,” and in the 1850s, well before the war, he said his “own poor eyes” might not last to see the end of slavery. The eyes suggest a kind of premature insight that carried its burdens and took its toll. Profundity was a part of Lincoln’s earliest style.
Lincoln, Joshua Speed said once, when he first saw him, was “ungainly” and, at another time, “a long, gawky, ugly, shapeless, man.” Lincoln, Speed continued, was six feet, four inches tall, “a little stooped in the shoulders,” with “long arms and legs, large feet and hands, a high forehead,” and a head that was “over the average size” (which had the subtextual meaning in the nineteenth century that its owner possessed unusual intelligence). Speed’s physical description of Lincoln sets up his observation that “He never lost the mobility of his nature, nor the kindness of his heart.” Speed also noticed Lincoln’s gray eyes and the wrinkles in his face and forehead, which deepened with age, the way channels dig into streams. Lincoln was a “very sad man,” but when he warmed up “all sadness vanished, his face was radiant and glowing, and almost gave expression to his thoughts before his tongue could utter them.” Speed often pondered what it was that “threw such charm around him” and concluded “it was his perfect naturalness. He could act no part but his own. He copied no one either in manner or style.”
Joshua Speed, who turned twenty-three in November 1837, was a strikingly handsome young man. He was the scion of a distinguished Kentucky family and had been born in 1814 on a large and prosperous plantation just outside Louisville. His father, John Speed, owned as many as sixty-two slaves in 1829. Joshua, however, disliked his father and set off for Springfield in 1834 to make his own way as a merchant. He spoke in a southern drawl and wore his curling dark hair long, nearly reaching his earlobes and just above his collar in the back, lending him the appearance of the contemporary romantic English poet Lord Byron. Speed’s thick eyebrows framed wide blue eyes that were set apart evenly in his long but proportioned face. His nose reached nearly to thick lips that in turn framed a sharply defined, angular chin. He was smoothly shaven. He was of average height and thus dwarfed by his friend Lincoln. Robert Kincaid describes Speed as “friendly, handsome, blue-eyed, medium-sized.” In the earliest surviving image of Speed, a small oval painting typical of the time, he looks confidently out from the canvas, a man ready to run a store and invest wisely. He seems intelligent, friendly, warm, and gentle. “He took a lively interest in public affairs,” his nephew wrote later, and “his personal friends and associates were in all parties.” His friendships, however, were “never affected by political or religious views differing from his own.”
Speed was prepared psychologically to idealize Lincoln. He was younger, more uncertain about himself, more vulnerable, softer. Lincoln was physically impressive and bore himself with the assurance of the fine athlete he was, his height exaggerated by his tall hat. Speed speaks with awe of Lincoln’s involvement in the “manly sports” in New Salem in which he either engaged or helped judge. Lincoln’s physical presence and athleticism drew Speed into his orbit. One expression of Speed’s instant attraction was that he spontaneously refused to charge Lincoln rent. It is commonly assumed now by scholars that the transaction nevertheless carried an implicit financial obligation and that there was an unspoken agreement that Lincoln would handle Speed’s legal matters for free. While that may have been true later (though also open to question), this interpretation ignores the fact that Speed himself makes no mention of such an arrangement in his account of welcoming Lincoln into his home and bed. Speed is otherwise quite detailed about the sequence of events leading up to and involving Lincoln in these years. In fact, Speed seemed instinctively motivated at the outset not to complicate his relationship with Lincoln by tethering it to financial obligations and placing it on a formal, business basis. He wanted their relationship to mature into a real friendship.
Lincoln’s self-presentation was as someone older than his age, in contrast to Speed, who appeared younger, thus lengthening psychologically the five actual years that separated them. Speed was not unaware of this dimension of their friendship. In describing Lincoln in New Salem, he notes Lincoln earned the sobriquet “Honest Abe,” but once in Springfield, “as he grew older,” Lincoln came to be called, affectionately, “Honest Old Abe” as early as his midthirties. The introduction to Speed’s Reminiscences, written by his nephew John Gilmer Speed, adds that Speed “regarded life with a serious business-like gravity, which led him to seek the companionship of young men of like disposition, or of persons older than himself.”
Speed seemed to bask in Lincoln’s easy assumption of superiority in his own self-presentation, wh
ich was joined to a ceaseless ambition. Lincoln reached for the stars. Orville Browning said of Lincoln in this period that he was “always a most ambitious man.” Herndon agreed. His ambition, said Herndon, was a “little engine that knew no rest.” The “sober truth” is that Lincoln was “inordinately ambitious,” which became manifest “in the year 1840 exactly.” Herndon’s dating of the beginning of something so much a part of one’s character as ambition may be overly precise, but it reflects his keen awareness of Lincoln’s early sense of his own potential greatness. There was at this point in Lincoln’s life a gap between his ambition to be a well-known lawyer and leading Whig politician (his dream was probably to be a senator in the mold of his hero, Henry Clay) and his actual existence as a small-town lawyer at the far edge of a large country. In a typically ironic and self-deprecatory line in an 1838 letter that speaks to his keen awareness of this chasm at this point in his life between actuality and ambition, Lincoln refers to “all my fancied greatness.” Those closest to him saw the potential greatness but didn’t feel it was all that fancied.
Given the difference in their social status before the mid-1830s, Lincoln was actually more worldly than Speed. By 1837 he had lived in three states; taken two flatboat trips to New Orleans; had all kinds of personal and business experiences in New Salem; served two stints in the Black Hawk War, in which he chased Indians to the border of Wisconsin; and had become a leading Whig in state politics and lived in Vandalia. Speed, to the manor born, knew luxury but little more than life at Farmington (the plantation where he was born and raised) and two years of service in a store in Louisville before coming to Springfield in 1834. His life had been privileged but circumscribed.
Lincoln also stood apart from Speed in his intellectuality. Speed had a more formal education, including his incomplete stint at St. Joseph’s College. He probably studied some Latin, perhaps a bit of Greek, and was exposed to readings in the humanities, mathematics, some limited science, and religion. But he was not intellectually inclined. In his many letters to his father and brother, along with the large number of letters he wrote Herndon after the war, Speed is clear, direct, and articulate but never makes literary allusions that suggest deep learning. He is passionate about the major political issues of the day and would play an important role for Lincoln in the early stages of the war, but nothing he writes is original or even provocative. He was shrewd but not profound, honest, moral, and engaging without possessing the qualities of mind that would set him apart from other respectable young men in Springfield.
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